Civic chief issues notice to deputy municipal commissioner

NAGPUR: Municipal commissioner Shyam Wardhane took the deputy municipal commissioner Rizwan Siddiqui (DCM) to task for not taking action against the fire department officials who had issued a no objection certificate to open a cold storage unit in a multi-storied building in Kalamna, apparently by ignoring the required norms.

On January 30, a major fire broke out in the aforesaid cold storage. The building in which the unit was established collapsed in the fire killing 18 and injuring 14.

Additional municipal commissioner Hemant Pawar confirmed that the civic chief has served a show cause notice to Siddiqui seeking an explanation as to why no action was taken against the officers who had issued the NOC to Pravesh Enterprises, owned by Pratibha Pramod Khandelwal, for the cold storage unit. The DCM has been served the notice based on an enquiry report submitted by Pawar.

The irregularities in the sanctioning of NOC came to fore when a social activist Kamlesh Shah sought information from the NMC's fire and emergency services department under Right To Information Act.

The information obtained under RTI shows that the Khandelwals had violated National Building Code (NBC) and Development Control Regulation (DCR) norms. Question arises as to how the fire department, then headed by chief fire officer Chandrashekhar Jadhav, gave NOC to the Khandelwals to start the cold storage.

It has come to fore that Jadhav had also advised Khandelwal to construct an underground water tank having a capacity of 2 lakh litre even though there wasn't any space for it.

In a complaint to Wardhane, Shah pointed out that the authorities might have illegally granted permission to the cold storage owners, bypassing many guidelines laid down under NBC and DCR.

In his complaint, Shah pointed out as to why Siddiqui took no action against the fire department officials who had turned a blind eye towards the blatant violation of rules by Khandelwals.

An additional 24 feet was illegally constructed in the building. In an inquiry report submitted by VNIT on the cause of the collapse, it is mentioned that the building was not fit to support the additional construction. Shah demanded that all those responsible for the building collapse must be booked for culpable homicide, criminal breach of trust and criminal conspiracy.